Revving up. Jeremy Keith advocates adding the revcanonical attribute to regular A elements as well as / instead of hiding it in the head of the document, following the microformats design principle that invisible metadata is less valuable than augmenting visible links. I’ve updated my shorten bookmarklet to handle this case. #12th April 2009, 12:29 pm

When APIs go dark, how do you do a data backup? (Answer: you often can’t.) With public, microformatted content, there will likely be a public archive that can be used to reconstitute at least portions of the service. With dynamic APIs and proprietary data formats, all bets are off.

Much like an oral agreement, publishing microformats is an informal agreement between you and (hopefully) a developer community that sets up a relationship with plenty of vagueness, inertial resistance to change, and potential landmines to step on. Would you create a real developer API without a TOS, agreement, or at the very least, guidelines? [...] are you prepared to announce all frontend markup changes? Does publishing a microformat without a special agreement mean that you are implicitly allowing comprehensive scraping of your web data?

Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit. The new built-in development tools look similar enough to Firebug to make me very happy. Also of interest: Selectors API (for fast getElementsBySelector), CSS 2.1 support, support for XHTML style namespaces in HTML, an interesting Web Slices feature based on the hAtom microformat and 6 connections per host (up from 2) which should make Comet easier. #5th March 2008, 6:28 pm

In hindsight, it was a mistake to launch Django People without support for OpenID. It was on the original feature list, but in the end I decided to cut any feature that wasn’t completely essential in order to get the site launched before it drowned in an ocean of “wouldn’t-it-be-cool-ifs”.

The technological future of the Web is in micro and macro structure. The approach to the micro is akin to proteins and surface binding--or, to put it another way, phenotropics and pattern matching. Massively parallel agents need to be evolved to discover how to bind onto something that looks like a blog post; a crumb-trail; a right-hand nav; a top 10 list; a review; an event description; search boxes.

lxml.cssselect (via) lxml includes an implementation of CSS 3 selectors, which compiles them to XPath expressions. Should be a useful tool for parsing Microformats from Python. #24th September 2007, 11:57 pm

Satisfaction signup page. Check out the box on the right: it lets you use hCard to instantly import your public profile data (including a user icon) from Flickr, Twitter, Upcoming and more. #18th September 2007, 11:25 am